What is Ansible?
Ansible is an open source IT automation engine that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration and many other IT processes. The Ansible site says it is free to use and that the project benefits from thousands of contributors. Red Hat sells a separate enterprise product, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, which combines more than a dozen upstream projects into a unified, security-hardened platform.
Ansible is agentless: you install it on a single host, called the control node, and it manages other systems from there. The installation guide lists Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, macOS, BSDs and Windows under WSL as supported control node platforms; Windows without WSL is not natively supported as a control node. Work is organized around an inventory of managed hosts and playbooks that describe the tasks to run.
The learning material on the site covers building an inventory, creating a playbook and Event-Driven Ansible rulebooks. A community forum is linked from the site for questions.
Key capabilities
- Inventories Define the hosts you manage
- Playbooks Describe tasks to run against them
- Agentless operation Install on one control node, no agent on managed hosts
- Event-Driven Ansible Rulebooks that react to events
- Community forum A place to ask questions
- Enterprise option Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Where Ansible fits
- Provisioning Create and prepare systems
- Configuration management Keep hosts in a described state
- Application deployment Roll out software
- Orchestration Coordinate multi-step IT processes
- Event-driven automation Respond to events with rulebooks
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